It has become common for users of host computers connected to the World Wide Web (the “web”) to employ web browsers and search engines to locate web pages having specific content of interest to users. A search engine, such as Microsoft Bing™, indexes tens of billions of web pages maintained by computers all over the world. Users of the host computers compose queries, and the search engine identifies pages or documents that match the queries, e.g., pages that include key words of the queries. These pages or documents are known as a result set. In many cases, ranking the pages in the result set is computationally expensive at query time.
Users may have a variety of intents while performing a search of the Web. For example, some users may already have in mind the site they want to visit when they enter a query, however, the users may not know the URL of the site or may not want to type in the full URL, and may rely on the search engine to present a link to the site they know they want to visit. Such queries may be referred to as navigational queries, i.e., queries in which the user already has an intended site in mind. An example of such a search arises when a user places a query in an attempt to find the homepage of Microsoft.
In other cases users may perform a search to find information about a subject. For example, the query “canon 5d review” can be regarded as informational, since users expect to find reviews and commentary concerning the Canon 5D camera. These queries may be referred to as informational queries. In yet other cases users may wish to perform transactions on a website. Such queries may be referred to as transactional queries. When a transactional query is placed, the user typically has some task or tasks to complete which may require actions or interactions with one or several websites. For example, the query “book Marriott hotel for my one week Hong Kong visit” can be regarded as transactional, because the user intent is to complete the task of booking a hotel room.
Because the user's intent affects the relevancy of the search requests, it would be helpful if the search engine could classify queries as being navigational, informational, or transactional. Such an ability could be helpful for improving the relevance of the search results that are presented to the user. Previous work has largely focused on classifying queries into informational and navigational categories. It would be helpful if transactional queries could be automatically identified as well.